Wednesday, 20 February 2013

Laura Welsh - Unravel

You can usually guess when something is happening for an artist with a deal or contracts or management or boring music industry business stuff when their previously available songs on Soundcloud or Bandcamp suddenly disappear. This is exactly what happened last year with Laura Welsh. After both ourselves and a handful of our independent UK blog loves including Flying With Anna (she’s like our gorgeous much younger sister), The Von Pip Musical Express (our funnier, wittier but grumpier brother), The Blue Walrus (our cousin that we’ve never met) all started getting hot-under-the-collar-excited about Laura (who had previously gone under the name Laura and the Tears) and then a few others from around the world came on board, the magic internet wand was waved and whoosh, the music was gone.

Until yesterday when as a new spell was cast and new material appeared.

Unravel is co-written and produced by Dev Hynes, he of Test Icicles, Lightspeed Champion and Blood Orange who also recently produced Solange’s Losing You. It finds Laura singing like a cup of velvety hot chocolate, all smooth and rich and not that removed from the likes of Jessie Ware. Of course too many cups of hot chocolate can be either too comforting or too sickening and with our table already full of similar mellow acts to drink up like Rhye, London Grammar and Jessie herself, Laura is going to have to excel to stand above the crowd if the rest of her new material is similar to this. Thankfully Laura has strong set of pipes on her and Unravel is as good as anything on Ware’s debut, so on this evidence there’s a strong chance.